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Report for Ubicomp 2011 - by Remi Tache
Event: Co-dine system setup for Ubicomp 2011. Location: Tsinghua University - Beijing, China. The Kitchen Media team including mysleft had the chance to publish and attempt to the Ubicomp conference 2011; one of the most prestigious conference of Ubiquitous computing. We flew to Beijing, capital of one of the most active country in the world for what will be a very enriching experience. I started to attempt to the conference on the Monday morning session with the keynote talk from Jan Chipchase followed by the first session talk from Jun Rekimoto. Many presentations followed those and especially the presentation of our work by Wei Jun who did a very good job at introducing our work to the panel and raised their interest. During the lunch time and the poster session we had the chance to interact with the panel to talk deeper about our work. After various afternoon talks we finished the day in the Microsoft Research Offices for a introduction to their latest ideas. Some of them and especially the mindThinker that help you making image search based on sketch you draw where very well though. The following day started with technical talk. I noticed a very inspiring talk about accurate 3D modeling based on Kinect like camera that could easily be used in the DSTA project to model accurately the CAD model of the environment. The lunch demos were mostly based on how cutting edges technologies could be used rather than introducing new algorithms or tools (e.g taxi detour detection). Main while we doing our best to receive our demo set that was still block in the Chinese customs. The night beautifully ended in the Summer palace with a general dinner where we had to chance to interact and meet more of the attendants. The final day talk session were mostly focusing on how important it is to gather data about people and what is the most efficient way to do it. With today's trend of personalizing the devices and the data provided to people there is a constant need for the technology to know who its dealing with to provide what the customer is susceptible to want. The Wednesday demo sessions started without us being able to present our work since the packages were still block at the airport. People were a bit disappointed since they looked forward to try our system. We all were disappointed to end the conference like that but could gather valuable feedback and ideas to make our next demo a even bigger success. The overall conference experience was highly inspiring. We had the chance to get positive feedback from people in the field of ubiquitous computing which motivate us in developing and enhance the overall system. It was also a interesting experience to be in China where the language and the writing alphabet is different. I definitely feel that one day, a technology could help breaking the barrier that language and customs created between local Chinese and us. Remi T.